Using a GPS too often can make you forget how to read a map. Letting a large language model write your emails can dull your own writing. This isn't just a hunch—it's a mathematical inevitability, according to a new paper from David C. Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute.
The Research
Krakauer modeled the relationship between a person, a tool, and a task as a single dynamical system. He found that the outcome is bistable: you end up either fully competent or fully dependent, with little in between. Competence and reliance co-evolve—the more you rely on a tool, the less competent you become, and the less competent you become, the more you rely. Above a critical threshold of tool availability, competence collapses to a low floor where the user outsources everything. Crucially, lowering availability does not reverse the collapse until a far lower threshold is reached. Your history of practice, not the current tool, locks you in. So two people with identical access to a tool can be in opposite states—one skilled, one helpless—depending on which they built first.
The collapse threshold depends on the user's initial competence and the tool's transparency—how much of its inner workings the user can reconstruct. Opaque tools like modern AI are especially dangerous because their models are too large to internalize, so agency transfers irreversibly to the tool. Krakauer tested his model against real-world data: GPS and map use (where navigation skills declined), arithmetic expertise (after calculators), and language models (writers' fluency eroded). The patterns matched.
Why It Matters
This means that every time you reach for a shortcut, you might be nudging your brain toward a tipping point. Once competence collapses, getting it back is extremely hard—you need to drastically reduce tool use below a much lower threshold. For everyday cognition, this explains why many people who grew up with calculators struggle with mental math, and why GPS users can't navigate without a screen. Your brain is plastic, but it also has hysteresis: where you end up depends on the path you took.
What You Can Do
- Practice without the tool first. Before using a GPS, try to navigate from memory. Before asking AI to write, draft yourself.
- Choose transparent tools. Use tools that let you see how they work, like a map compared to turn-by-turn directions.
- Alternate between tool and no-tool. Build competence and reliance in cycles to avoid getting stuck in dependence.
Source: arXiv q-bio.NC
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